I Choked at the Finals and Found My Voice
Losing the trophy on stage taught me why I climb stages at all.
Four hundred people watched me forget my own grandmother.
That is the only accurate way to describe what happened at the national spoken word finals, two minutes and ten seconds into a three minute poem, on a stage lit like an operating table.
I had not forgotten a poem in six years of competing. I was the one other poets asked about memorization, and I had a whole speech about it, muscle memory, walking the lines, recording yourself at half speed. The week before the finals, the power went out in my building for two nights, and I rehearsed in my kitchen by candlelight, my shadow performing along with me on the wall like a coach who never gets tired. By the night of the finals I could have said that poem underwater. I want you to understand how prepared I was, because this is a story about how preparation was never the problem.
The poem was about my grandmother, who raised me for nine years and died the spring I turned twenty-six. It was, according to three regional judges and one very enthusiastic man in a Whitman t-shirt, the best thing I had ever written. It had a shape like a wave. It built and built through her kitchen, her gray braid, the church fans in summer, and it crested on a line about her hands, how at the end I held her hand in the hospital and her grip was still strong... still sure... still hers.
That was the line. Her grip was still strong. That is where, in front of four hundred people, with a trophy sitting on the judges' table close enough to read my name on the air above it, my mind went white.
Not blank. White. Blank suggests something missing. This was something arriving. Because here is what nobody tells you about the moment you choke: sometimes your memory does not fail.
Sometimes it refuses.
Her grip, in the hospital, had not been strong. That was the problem. Her grip at the end was nothing, a loose warm weight, a hand I held shut around mine like packing a parachute I knew would not open. I had written that version first, in the terrible weeks after, and then, draft by draft, I had edited her dying into something an audience could cheer for. Strong. Sure. Still hers. It scored better. Grief with good posture always scores better.
Standing in the silence, I could not remember the stage version because my whole body had gone on strike against it. Two hundred shows in my life and I had never before heard four hundred people be that quiet. The mic hummed. Someone's chair creaked and I heard which row it came from. The five second rule for a stumble came and went... Ten seconds. In slam time, ten silent seconds is a career.
Then I heard myself say, quietly, off script, That last line is a lie. I have been telling it for a year.
You could feel the room change temperature. The judges looked up. And I stood on the national finals stage, timer running, trophy watching, and told the truth at conversational volume. That her grip was not strong. That I held her hand shut around mine and lied to her that I had eaten. That the poem they had been enjoying was a padded room I built so that I could visit my grief once a week, on stage, for points, without ever once staying the night.
It did not rhyme. It had no shape like a wave. The timekeeper flashed the light and I said thank you and walked off before the scores came in.
The scores came in. Sevens... mostly. One judge gave me a 6.8, which in finals terms is a door closing.
I took fourth out of four.
In the lobby afterward, my coach hugged me with the particular gentleness people use on the newly diagnosed, and the man in the Whitman shirt would not meet my eye.
But a woman from the third row was waiting by the exit. Sixty-something, church cardigan, holding her program like a hymnal. She said her sister had died in March, and that everyone kept telling her she was strong, and that she was so tired of being congratulated for her posture. Yours was the only thing tonight that sounded like the inside of my house, she said. Then she squeezed my hand, loose and warm... and left, and I stood in that lobby and cried harder than I had at the actual funeral.
I did not lose my words that night. I lost the script, and underneath the script, for the first time in years, were my words.
Everyone carries a failure that taught them something. Mine simply had an audience of four hundred and a scoreboard. It took me months to understand what I had actually learned, and it was not the tidy lesson, not be yourself, not honesty wins, because honesty did not win, honesty came fourth. The lesson was worse and better than that. It was a question: who was I climbing all those stages for? For six years the answer had been the judges, the scores, the wave-shaped roar. That answer had slowly turned my grandmother into a prop with a firm handshake. The woman in the cardigan gave me a different answer to climb for, and there is one of her in every room, usually in the third row, and she can hear the difference between a poem and a performance from the parking lot.
That winter I rewrote the poem the refusing way, weak grip, parachute, lies about breakfast, and I never entered it in another slam. I posted it instead on a community wall for poets, where nobody scores anything, and the notes that came back were not cheers. They were confessions. My mother's hands. My husband's hands. Sounded like the inside of my house, one wrote, and I have come to believe that is the entire job, being the inside of a stranger's house for three minutes. Later I wrote about memory itself, how it is not a recording but a courtroom, and how mine had finally called me to the stand.
I still compete sometimes. I still love a loud room. But now, the night before any stage, I light a candle in the kitchen, turn off every light, and say the poem once to my shadow on the wall. If I can say every line with the lights off, to an audience of one dead grandmother, it goes in the set. If some line makes me flinch, I do not fix my memory.
I fix the line.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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